Hand-Marked Ballots Responsible for All Errors Found in Georgia Runoff Audit

Nearly 1.12 million ballots cast during Georgia’s June 16 runoff election were reviewed as part of a statewide audit, with election officials reporting just 23 discrepancies across the entire sample.

According to reporting from Rough Draft Atlanta, every discrepancy identified during the ballot image audit involved a ballot completed by hand. Officials said the review found no discrepancies among the 1,079,408 ballots cast using ballot-marking devices.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said the findings reinforce concerns about the possibility of human error when voters manually fill out ballots. He argued that hand-marked ballots are more likely to produce differences between a voter’s intended selection and the marks that ultimately appear on the ballot.

The Secretary of State’s office said the audit examined all 1,111,856 ballot images from the runoff election, producing an overall accuracy rate of 99.9979%. Officials calculated that hand-marked ballots achieved a 99.93% accuracy rate, while ballots generated with ballot-marking devices were found to be 100% accurate during the review.

State election officials also projected that applying the same error rate to a presidential election with approximately 5 million ballots would result in roughly 3,500 discrepancies.

The audit arrives as Georgia continues debating the future of its voting system. Earlier this year, lawmakers voted to extend the use of QR codes on ballots through 2028, giving election officials additional time to develop and implement a replacement system after Gov. Brian Kemp signed the legislation into law.

As Rough Draft Atlanta noted, the issue has become a flashpoint in broader debates over election administration. Some Republicans have advocated for a return to hand-marked paper ballots, while President Donald Trump has continued promoting paper ballots nationwide as he repeats unsupported claims about Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results.